The Future of Accounts Payable for Acumatica Users

Webinar Transcription

Britney: It’s Britney Sharleen [SP] and I am on the marketing team here at AvidXchange. For today’s webinar, we will be covering the future of Accounts Payable, the next era, so what Acumatica users need to know. Before we begin, I do want to go over a few things. As you all are in listening only mode, if you do have any questions, please just put those into the questions box in your control panel and we will make sure to answer during Q and A at the end. Also following the presentation, I will be sending out a recording of the webinar as well as a slide deck. So you can expect that from mid by tomorrow afternoon.

Mike: So thank you, Britney…

Britney: And our presenter, there you go. [inaudible 00:00:48], take it away.

Mike: Okay, eventually we’ll figure this out, Britney. Hi, everybody, my name is Mike Johnson. I’m from AvidXchange and we welcome you to this lovely webinar on a Thursday afternoon. So I appreciate your time and respect that. We’re going to keep to about 45 minutes, so as Britney articulated if you’ve got questions just put them in the chat box. We’ll have a Q and A at the end and you will receive a recording and the slides from this deck.

The reason I think that’s important is that it’s not about us, it’s really about you. And what I find more often in speaking Acumatica users today it’s about research. It’s about getting the information before you make your decision. So without a doubt, there’s lots of trends and signs that we see in the finance world today that are really calling and beckoning for companies like yours to automate this process. But it all begins with information and research. So that’s really the intent here today is to share some learnings with you. Put together a quick agenda, we’ll do the introduction and we’ll talk about the next era of AP, what that all means, the benefits of AP automation, and our solution with Acumatica. Then we’ll have an audience poll and then we’ll do a quick Q and A.

So as I mentioned, my name is Mike Johnson. I’ve been with AvidXchange going on four years. So I had the luxury in my career and past to have been a business owner, run businesses, an entrepreneur. I actually ran a company for five years for a gentleman and I had rep to check responsibility. Why is that important? Because it gave me a unique opportunity to sit on your side of the desk. So I have a great appreciation for what you do as finance professionals and keeping your company running efficiently and effectively and all the things that you’re challenged with when it comes to your processes. And that’s, you know, saving time, making money for the company, strategically helping your organization or company grow.

So I feel today honored to be able to talk to you about an area that’s really accelerating in interest an adoption. That’s called AP automation. So we’re going to share a lot of content for you, we like to coin this the next era of AP automation because a lot of you on Acumatica and I was at the 6.0 launch. And great, great news. We’re now certified for 6.0 here in AvidXchange means our integration’s been tested and approved by Acumatica itself.

So I’ve been working with Acumatica over the last couple of years and we’re seeing a lot of adoption. Obviously, the folks at Acumatica are building it the right way from a cloud-based solution, no legacy stuff that is going to muck it up. So we’re seeing lots of excitement and enthusiasm in the financial world when it comes to adopting Acumatica as an ERP system. So thank you for joining us today.

So before we begin and before we start our conversations, typically with companies like yours we want to find out more about your process. So this is kind of a…this is our kind of our a breaking ice conversation slide. We want to know how invoices come in today, how you’re receiving them, are the vendors emailing them, are they just mailing them? Who’s opening the mail or maybe downloading an e-mail and perhaps printing it out. And you’re working with a PO process. I know I’ve spoken to a lot of Acumatica users and they’re in the manufacturing distributions. So they have heavy PO requirements and when I say heavy, we’re talking about three-way match with receiving documents, maybe inventory. So I’d like to uncover that early.

You know, who’s routing the mail? How’s it getting out to people for approval? Is everybody under one roof or do you have other locations and around the country that you have to overnight or e-mail and attach documents sending them out? Who codes? Who’s doing the approval process? What’s that look like? Are you stamping it? Are you basically replying to an email, it’s okay to pay? Anything attached, and then when you review it against the invoice coming in the finance, back in the finance, you view against budget, who’s doing the data entry into your Acumatica system?

So who’s doing that keying, who’s taking the time to do that? And how much or how many invoices do you process on a monthly basis? So kind of gives us an understanding of what goes on and then once it’s in your accounting system, as we often find is the rule, now you’ve gotta pay vendors eventually. So how…and when you post to the GL and you make the decision to pay your vendors, how do you do that? You know, within Acumatica, are you utilizing other payment options that may be out there, maybe wire, maybe a bank ACH. maybe the boss has an AMEX card that you like to pay vendors for the [inaudible 00:05:05]? What’s going on in your payment world?

And then once you’re done with that, where do you put the invoice and the corresponding maybe check image or documentation or do you have your vendor files? And how are those organized? Kind of the rule here is that the longer you’re in business, the more filing cabinets you’ll have and the more challenging it becomes to find data or find information when you need it. So research in this world is really a manual process, so there’s lots of time and energy that’s spent here. It doesn’t look like much when you think of, you know, you’ve probably got people who are highly trained, highly skilled and very familiar with this process. But it does.

If you were to take a look at what we do here at AvidXchange, everything you see that replaced by the X, which is our logo, is replaced by our technology. And when I say technology, we’re cloud-based like Acumatica. So it’s software as a service. So there’s no hardware or software that you need to buy, nothing special. So we can we can guarantee an implementation in about 45 days so we can automate the process. We actually touch AP in five different areas but today we’re really going to talk about just invoice and payment automation.

So we can eliminate the need to receive invoices, print invoices or print emails, opening up mail, routing it out for approval, attaching a P.O, you’re driving the coding process but we do have some technology there that can save some time. And then the approval process. So it’s all automated, all automated workflows and then simply put when it comes back to the AP team for the final review and coding, we integrate directly with your accounting system. So we pass a fully coded invoice data including the invoice image into Acumatica using an API. So it’s a techie term for how do we get it into there and that’s the pathway or gateway we use to connect your Acumatica system.

We believe in your accounting system as kind of this…not kind of but it is a system of record. So we want to get the approval process, all the information associated with it into your accounting system as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sometimes this can shorten what we’ve seen and reported on about a 25 days, 28 days cycle to get this fully through the process. We could shorten that down to two or three days, so dramatic time savings when it comes to automating your process. So once it’s in your Acumatica system as a business, you’ll probably like everybody else say, “Okay, we’ve got approved invoices, we’ve got vendors we need to pay.” So we can help eliminate, reduce the dependency on paper checks, and the time it’s associated with your staff. So we could facilitate, here at AvidXchange, facilitate payments to your vendors the way they want to be paid.

And what do I mean by that? That means if a vendor wants a paper check, we provide them a paper check. But we offer them options. We have two forms of electronic options that are available to them and vendors are adapting and adopting these processes very quickly and rapidly because we’re helping solve a problem for them. We’re getting them their payment information, all the corresponding remittance detail very quickly and efficiently and they’re not waiting for a check to come through the mail. And now I’m ultimately not calling you and saying, “Hey, I sent an invoice, where’s the check?” and you’re saying, “it’s in the mail.” And them saying, “Right.” and then having to wait and delay their gratification for receiving monies or funds for the services or goods that you procured for them.

So because it began electronically, it’s stored electronically. So it’s mobile. We’ll scale for mobile, no specific mobile app needs to be downloaded. We compress to an iPhone, an Android, an iPad, a tablet, a laptop. So you don’t have to go out and buy a specific application to access critical AP data. And then so research becomes a mobile phenomenon. I mean you’re not constrained or tied to an office to come in to approve invoices or approve payments. you can do that remotely.

So what this all boils down to and what this really means to our customers and could mean to you is time. This is a dramatic time, 28 days down to 2 or 3 days. Some of our clients are reporting processing times dropped saved as much as 60 percent of their time in a month, a quarter, a year. The big question that results out of this, the aha moment would be for you on the other end of the phone is to determine what would I do with all that time? So that’s the big challenge or big question because we’re all working under that mandate that we’ve been under for probably 20 years.

I’m a baby boomer. So we heard this a long time ago, we’re doing more with less. And what that really meant to us is we’re not hiring people to do these processes, we’re going to make do with the people we have. So can technology be deployed that’s going to help those people in their functions, within their roles in the organization? And perhaps, at the end of the rainbow, with all this time savings they become more strategic to our company.

So they’re thinking in terms of how do I help my company grow? How can I work on capturing vendor discounts? How can I work on vendor contracts? How can I work on issues areas of compliance, processes or procedures? Lots of things that bright intelligent and educated finance folks would love to be involved with if we can just get them out from under the paper.

So let’s take a look at the benefits overall. So number one benefit really is saving money. So we go to some studies from Pay Stream Advisors, Aberdeen Research, two well-known and well-branded industry pundits. They go out and survey folks like yourself across the country on what’s going on in your world. And they found that the average cost to process a paper invoice, that front end of before payments, is about nine dollars per invoice. It can be higher, by the way, depending on where you are located. If you’re in New York City, your rents cost you a lot more so your cost of processing obviously goes up. And we’re talking about material, labor, time that’s spent here. In an automated invoice process, particularly here at AvidXchange, we cut that cost down to a $1.50 for all the things I’m about to show you when we do a quick demo today.

On the payment side, industry statistics show that they reveal, that the cost of printing a paper check can be as high as $7.15. So you looking at an all in cost of over $16 to process an invoice from all the way from receipt approval, coding, data entry in accounting system to payment. That’s pretty costly if you do the math. If you’ve got 500 invoices you’re spending some pretty good money there just processing paper or processing invoices. And on our payment solution, we can facilitate payments to your vendors, which include a paper check, for…and two forms of electronic payment for a low cost of 68 cents per payment.

So some traumatic two dollar…a little over $2 versus $16, the ROI is pretty compelling. The secret here, though, is we’re not talking about perhaps eliminating people, we’re talking about adding efficiency. So this is hard dollars that can come back to your company. So what drives up the cost? It’s really that manual labor, the hourly wage, the salary, the time that’s spent, that data entry that’s going into the accounting system.

I once had a fascinating discussion with a CFO. I’m chuckling because it’s quite enlightening. I was speaking with the CFO and controller and they said, “Hey get the AP person in here, we want to talk about this AP automation. So the AP person came in and had not been informed, so she was already ready for a fight when she walked in the door when she heard we were talking about AP automation. And they were doing about a thousand invoices a month and it got down to almost…it got down to a very verbal argument between her and her CFO when it came down to, hey, how many voices could we do if we automated versus manual?

And she claimed that she could process 600 invoices in a set period of time and the CFO looked at her and said I don’t believe it. And the AP person said, “Time me.” and he said, “I’m going to time you.” and she said, “Well, go ahead.” and then the CFO said, “Well, if you can do them that fast, it explains all the errors.” And I went oh! It’s time I left the room. So there’s a cost associated with processing invoices, you know, shipping, receiving documents, filing. There’s storage space, you’ll have to buy more filing cabinets. The typical labor cost associated in AP on a manual process, by studies reveal about 60% of your total cost. So a lot of time and money is being spent in a process that really is kind of crazy when you think about we’re in 2017.

And if you’re like me and my wife or my wife and I–correct English there–you’ll probably be paying your vendors, which are your suppliers, your cable, your phone, your electric, , you’re going online and doing that at home as a consumer. But yet we come to work and we deal with paper invoices and paper checks. So we’re spending a lot of time. The number two benefit is really, you can grow your business without adding additional staff. Remember that age old age old adage which is hey, we’re gonna do more with less and well we all knew that meant for the bosses, we’re going to do it without hiring people. So how can technology help me scale or grow the business without adding additional people to do it? Then if you don’t require in this world it’s a SaaS funnel. That’s why you adopted Acumatica. It’s in the cloud, no IT experts required.

You simply take access as a service that you can offer…you can tap into and help your business grow. So we’re not asking you to allocate already strained IT resources. Have you ever seen an IT person with a smile on their face? Very difficult to find. There’s no expensive hardware. So we’re gonna do all the processing, all the facilitation. You’re not having to buy scanners and computers to do this, it’s mobile invoice and payment approval. So you can log on, be alerted on your phone or tablet that you have invoices or payments waiting for you, see those actions, act on those actions and improve and process payments.

You can connect anywhere, anytime. That’s what we’ve been working within the last 20 years 20 plus years with the Internet. It took a while to get here to business but, you know, typically I find in today being where we are in 2017, most finance people are really receptive to this cloud approach. You adapted Acumatica. If we were to flashback or jump back in time to probably eight, nine years ago and I said cloud, you’d be looking out the window like most of us were going where is that?

So another reason that you can grow without adding staff is that it’s highly scalable. So technology doesn’t require more people, it just grows with your business. We have a study that we did with a customer that’s, you know, average they were processing on a monthly basis about 1500 invoices. We timed it and it equated to about 40 hours of work. So that was one full-time person doing invoices, 1500 in a month. When we implemented AvidXchange, they were able to triple that. So they’re able to go to 35 to 4000 invoices on a monthly basis with that same person because they didn’t have to do the data entry, they didn’t have to handle the paper. So it allowed them to do three times of processing capacity in their AP department without adding a single staff, which incurs salary, benefits and all the things that are associated with employees. And that’s number two as far as the benefits, it’s unscalable.

Now, here’s a real life example of SMS Holdings, they’ve been a customers of ours for quite a while. And what they found is that they were able to reduce their cost for processing down 30 to 40%. That’s a bottom line impact on the overall company. So really what we’re putting into place for them was not only an automation so it will save time and money but it increased the accountability and visibility into a process that was really limited when you think in terms of invoices in paper and checks going out.

We just had a webinar a little while ago where we’re talking about fraud. You think in terms of paper checks, that’s one of those frauded documents. So all this ability to work on the cloud and use automation increases your visibility. So…and electronic audits that the SMS was doing, it’s just really simple. Simply put, the ability to log in, generate reports, search data and create reports out of the box and on the fly that can help them manage the business.

The number three risk of benefits that we just mentioned a few seconds ago is fraud, reduce the risk of fraud. Lots of companies keep this as the dirty little secret because when you look at the survey, here 70% of all corporate respondents have been victims of check fraud. That’s right, check fraud. If we were to jump across the pond over to Europe, you would find that there is nobody understands what a paper check is anymore but here in the U.S. we’re enamored with them and we also have a requirement. We have vendors that still require a paper check.

Think of the small company, the vendor, the service provider, the landscaper, the custodial company you work with. Typically they still require checks. So we can’t fully break our addiction to paper checks here in the US but they still leave us at risk. So in 48% of that payment fraud can be tracked to paper checks. Yes, we facilitate payments as I mentioned to our customers’ vendors the way they want to be paid and that includes a paper check. We have caught some fraudulent activity on paper checks.

The advantage of and I’d love to share the story with you how we provide a hundred percent fraud protection in that case. Our customers were never at jeopardy, their bank accounts were never at jeopardy of being frauded. The plain truth about this is if you if you confess that you’ve been frauded it’s already too late because if anyone has experience at its…I’ve got to go back and get the money and that’s never an easy process.

So here’s an example for me that hits really home because I’m calling in today from New Hampshire. So this is a story I pulled out of the New Hampshire Union Leader which is our local state paper where a 60-year-old guy had figured out a way to embezzle over $100,000 over 6 years from his customer. Wasn’t a huge chunk all at once, right? Over six years but it got caught. Usually, the way they get caught by the way is they, you know, now that they’ve got some money in their pocket, they take a vacation. That requires somebody to come in and help process AP for a while, could be a temp. I know several instances of companies that have caught fraudulent activity just because the employee wasn’t there that day.

A lot of times it usually starts with a dummy invoice, a fraudulent invoice that comes in and then they facilitate a payment to a bank account and then they’ll work within the accounting system to reduce their exposure that. And you’re out of the money. I have some great stories but Google them. There’s lots of fascinating stories of people that have been frauded. And the irony though is if they’re in the press it’s already too late and the damage has been done, can never get all the money back.

So how do we prevent fraud when we lose technology? Within technology, in our automation solution, you can afford strict adherence to business rules so that restricts or reduces your opportunities for somebody to fraud you, I’m sorry. So what that means is that we when we build a portal for you, it’s your portal. So you simply, you know, we work in a role and a rule, the role is typically your job, the rule is simply what you can do when you’re in a portal. You control access, you control visibility, you can lock down, people only see what you want them to see. And everything is date and time stamped.

Every time they touch an e-mail or touch an invoice or process a pavement, it has their fingerprints all over it electronically so you can see in the audit trail who did what when, how long it took to go to your process. It’s all reportable. Since it is your portal we have vendors…we have customers that actually invite their auditors in for read-only access so that they can come in and do their report. So every invoice can be scrutinized for legitimacy because it has that control point of being data captured, date and time stamped and going through a logical process where there are checks and balances. People are collaborating on the information and before it goes in your accounting system, your finance team has that final review.

And so every payment that we process on behalf of our customers as has a positive pay element to it. We guarantee a hundred percent fraud protection and there we can implement approval workflow. So if you have got somebody in your organization…and this happens pretty frequently…somebody says, “Hey the boss, the owner wants to see the checks before they go out,” we can certainly accommodate that and provide you an additional level of pay control so everybody has the checks and balances all the way from invoice, capture, receive, all the way through the payment process.

So number four benefit of AP automation is eliminate paper or the tedious manual work. It’s all about time, you can’t get more back in the day. If you’re here in the US economy, you’re really are, as a business owner, are challenged to grow the company and grow the business, right? Now, that’s the biggest challenge. How do I do that? You know, how do I do that without…with adding people but adding in the right position? I know there’re…lots of my friends only run businesses and tell me without a doubt the number one challenge they have is not growing the business, it’s finding the right people.

We seem to be in a in a gap here in the employment ranks with finding the right and talented people to come work for our companies. It’s a very interesting time frame when you think of the baby boomers are aging out and who’s coming up behind them. I have a couple of kids that are millennials, one is just about to graduate college, the other one graduated and is working. So those people are coming with a different mindset, different competitive standards, different experiences. They’re what I would call, when I’ve read, they’re a technology native. They get this stuff, this is how they live, they breathe, they work. For those of us that are baby boomers, we’re immigrants, we’re technology immigrants. We didn’t create this stuff, we are now using it. But they grew up with it so it’s second nature to them.

So I can start, I can grow my business by applying technology and finding the right people to use it. So when we look at the time spent, it’s an interesting and fascinating revelation here is that an AP staff member can spend as much as four hours each day in the paper process. I once was meeting with a sporting shop, a small business up here in New England and the assistant controller asked me to come in to talk to him. And I walked I appreciated and I said, Kirk, thanks for the meeting. He said, hey, sit down and I looked around his office and I’m like, “Where?” He had files on every chair and every cabinet and every desktop you could imagine.

So you know, just getting access to data and knowing where everything is, it could take a lot of time. So a lot of time is allocated to that manual process and automation can really give you that time back. Here’s a task that we typically find when we talk to folks on your side saying, “Hey, what do you do?” There’s time allocated to opening stuffed emails, scanning, coding, looking up tax information, entering invoice data into your accounting system, printing, signing and mailing checks. Does it all sounds familiar? Because this is probably the process in many of your companies. So if you’re looking at automation, all these things are go away.

You can say goodbye, particularly in the audit trail, to paper. So we here at AvidXchange are archiving data based on IRS regulations for seven years. But we have we’ve been in business since 2000. We’re headquartered out of Charlotte, North Carolina, there are over 900 of us that are providing this software and service to our customers, 6000 customers today. And we haven’t thrown anything away for 7, going on 17 years. So you can archive, you can store this data, you can access it. We have over a hundred reports built out of our system so you can you can find out data that dates back years and years and years. So great opportunity for your company to take advantage of technology without adding people but saving yourself time.

How AP automation, our solution with an intact…I’m sorry, I clicked ahead. So our solution with insight of intact, how we help, we have the ability for you as a client of AvidXchange with Acumatica is to receive 100% of your invoices electronically. So there is time that’s saved there. We can facilitate 100% of the data capture and guarantee a 99% accuracy rate. What that means to you is less fixing, less correcting. You can actually work on that fully coded proof and get that process done for you.

We can implement enhanced workflow, so based on the uniqueness of your process when you’re looking at hey, I’ve got multiple companies, multiple departments and they’re all rolling up to a central accounting office but each one of those locations could have unique workflows based on the business or based on their location and approvals and people that are approving. So lots of flexibility, lots of configurability. And we think in terms of how we can adopt near your process. And we pass the AP data in Acumatica with no manual data entry.

So right there alone is some significant time savings. And as I mentioned earlier we facilitate 100…we can facilitate 100% on your payments to your vendors regardless of the vendor’s preferred method. And that, as I mentioned, includes a paper check and two forms of electronic payment. So where does it all begin? Really begins with capturing those invoice data. So we can build you a portal in less than 45 days or sooner. So we have a guarantee around that, you know, give me a call, I’d like to share how we do that.

So we move rapidly to get you on board and get you accessing this technology and saving all the things we’re talking about here today but it starts with data capture. So we want to mirror or really mirror what you do with your vendors today. So vendors are more change reluctant than anybody. So think in terms of how does your vendor send your invoices to you today? So two weeks before you go live we collaborate with you out to your vendors, we have the verbiage, the language, the letters, the emails that go out and say, “Hey, we’ve automated our AP process with AvidXchange. If you’re going to mail it, here’s our new P.O. Box.”

We have data processing centers on the east and west coast. If you going to email it here’s our unique company email address, AvidXchange, or with the uScan process, where if somebody walks in the door today and says, “Hey Mike, look what I bought, here’s my invoice, how do I get that into an automated system?” Simply throw down any printer that has a scanner PDF and drop it in. We have the ability to marry up or match up with EDI, which is electronic data interchange. We think in terms of, hey, these are older systems that are out there vendored to a client. Also, API which is a new rail…a way to connect which we’re using with Acumatica in our solution or a vendor portal.

So we receive it, we extract it, we’re going to capture a normalized header detail which is all important and then we’re going to analyze. This is that service level that we bring that really elevates what you get back from us and that it guarantees that 99% accuracy is we’re going to learn a little bit about you and your vendors. So these are actually people that are looking to collaborate with you and we’ll call an exception queue. Why do we consider exceptions? Exceptions are things like net new net new vendors or duplicate invoices or invoices that are really so bad it’s hard to scan them.

So we become very familiar with you and your vendors and we expose those to you and communicate those to your AP team so you can help drive that process. So you’re not just getting data from us as being thrown over the wall. So…and then once this is delivered, it’s delivered via email. So we get email alerts all day long, I’m in our demo portal, I’m about to log in and show it from my colleagues who are showing companies like yours how we automate the process.

So you get an email alert saying, “Hey, you’ve got invoices waiting for your approval.” And it gives you some related data that the vendor, the amount, the invoice number, then you simply log in and we’re going to do that now. Log into your avid portal. I’m going to log in, we built your portal, we brand it for you, so I’m going to login as Marie Cannon.

Now typically with most of our customers, it’s really the invoice receiver or the first people are the AP team. And there’s somebody in the AP team that’s opening the mail, downloading the emails or routing the emails out for people’s approval. So that’s how I’m going to assume here, Marie Cannon is that person in that department. So Marie receives an email saying, “Hey, she’s got invoices,” this is her first view, this is showing her her work queue and saying that she’s got 10 invoices pending her approval. She can scroll through it if she wants. You can put the vendor over here, the invoice number, you know prefer the layout that she wants, the invoice dates.

So you can simply scroll through here and then check out an invoice, let’s say she wants to look at this invoice. This is her first view of the electronic paper, so whether it’s one or a hundred pages, she can simply scroll through it and review it. And then during the capture process, as I mentioned we’re verifying all the header detail, the invoice number, the totals, the due days. We’ve build your portal, we load it with your vendor information, also your chart of accounts. So that’s all here, so this is all automated and comes to you’re ready to roll.

If you’re working with a PO, we can we can attach the PO here as a hyperlink referencing it. So that you can look at the PO versus the invoice at this point. So now you’ve got this invoices already, typically what we see is Maria would want to do a little bit of coding. We have four ways that you can code within our system but first let me point out that you see this header descriptions here, entity codes, accounting codes, job codes, you may be sitting on the other end of this webinar going, “Hey Mike, I don’t have any of those. I have these.”

During our implementation process, we mirror your process to reflect what you’re looking to pull from the invoice. So we map that to your AP portal, let me build for you. But now she wants to code this process. So obviously, you know, we think in terms of how can we code, we could manually code? So she can start typing in in alpha, it’s gonna pull up a chart of accounts. She can select the chart, the correct code here or she can start typing in a number and it’s gonna pull up all the different codes that she can do.

So this is manual coding if she wants me to distribute this invoice meaning that hey, AC supply is going to be shared over multiple departments’ locations and entities, she can do that by just adding distribution lines and she can do that manually obviously. But she you can do that by dollar or percentage amount.You can see she’s got a remaining balance of 502, let me just finish this out so she’s got a zero remaining balance. So she’s done and I’m doing manual coding here.

Technology that we employ here or deploy here to help save time, this way you can turn it on or off. The first one is called Auto Coding. So the invoice would automatically show up. Let’s say this was a recurring invoice and it always had this code associated with it, why do you have to go and code it manually? So a few seconds, a few minutes, that we’re saving you some time, one of my clients has told me that this is saving his staff, because they have a lot of recurring invoices, about 30% of their time. They’re not having to open up every invoice and do the coding but they can always override it.

The other technology that we deploy here is smart coding. So after three instances, the system says, “Hey, we’ve got a pattern here and we’ll automatically code the invoice for you.” Again, you override that at any point. It is your AP portal, you’re driving this process. Or the fourth one is say that within this HD supply, it’s going to be shared by 25 different locations, you don’t want to do a manual line by line coding. You can actually build that within your Acumatica system and then do what we call import codes. We supply you with a download template, it’s kind of a sexy Excel spreadsheet and then you just import those codes and the invoice is distributed for you.

So while we’re at the invoice level I just wanna point out a couple of other things. You can attach anything to the invoice, this could be a receiving document, a packing slip. One of my clients is a controller and she puts on the email string that she’s had, the conversation with the vendor. So when she’s at the approval level, she knows exactly what they’re committed to. It’s all right in front of her, she doesn’t ping pong back and forth between a folder, between her email. You can comment [inaudible 00:32:30] externally and you could see some comments in here.

It is your portal, you control this access as I mentioned. So you can invite auditors in, you can send emails out to vendors. Typically when I’m meeting with a company, I’ll get the person’s email address that we’re talking while we’re at this level. I’ll type in their email and send them a comment so they can see what it is. It’s going to send it, this note’s gonna be attached. It says, you know, Warren here at the invoice we spoke about. This was a conversation I had with Forshaw, they’re an extermination company down in the North Carolina area this morning. So I sent this out to him. He’s got an email alert, it’s got the note, it’s got the invoice attached to it so he can call me and we have an informed conversation. So that becomes part of the audit trail.

We have the workflow and I’m going to show you the audit trail in a second but workflow can be as flat or as robust as your heart content and you decide. This is showing a four step, so it’s sequential: one, two, three, four. Flows through the process. Step one is it comes in, Bob Smith that is review of code. We work in that role and the rule, this is Bob’s job and this is what he can do when he’s in there. So he’s completed it, he hit the approve button. It set it pending all these Marie Cannon’s which is my other sales colleagues are doing demos like these for customers and prospects. So it’s in the review and approve stage.

So once this invoice is approved it can roll up to Jim Johnson or maybe not because we have a condition here. Jim is the VP of finance, he doesn’t want to approve invoices under $5000, he doesn’t have to. And then once it’s done with that process, it rolls back automatically to the AP team where you’ve got Gary and Paige who’re doing their AP review. So once they review or approve the invoice, it’s ready for that ATI connection to Acumatica.

While we’re here I wanted to point out the audit trail because this is very important. So this is an auditors dream when you think in terms of what’s happened with that invoice. So you could show when it came in, it came in on the twentieth of February at this time. Every time you see the word system it’s the AvidXchange system doing a start and stop. So it’s like a little timer. You can see how long Mike Johnson had the invoice, how long Bob Smith did, what did he do, he did some distributions. You could see all the comments, you can see the comment I had here from this morning with Warren when I was speaking with him. All this is reportable and you can generate reports on it.

So let me do a quick ad-hoc report. So this is a very rich tool or functionality. What it means to you is that at any time during the month or quarter or the year, you want access to what’s going on in my AP world and I want to be able to generate a report. I can generate an ad-hoc report on the invoice number I can search on, I can search on status, approved, disputed, pending, voided. I can search by vendor. I can search by entity which could be a location or I could just do a simple date range.

So let’s take a look at…this is our sales portal, not a lot of activity here but let’s do a quick search. You can see there’s nine invoices in this date range, let me create a report, AvidXchange, you can either export it to a CSV file or we’ll create a little PDF report for you. We’ll include the image, the summary, that history tab and any payment data because remember, we can process payments or facilitate payments for you to your vendors. So that would all show up here, so this will be a quick PDF report in less than 15 seconds I’ve got access to. And it’s going to show, it’s going to list all the invoices in that date range.

There’s 67 pages of data, so here’s the list. You’ve got the header detail, the all-important coding segment, so that was coded. And then this is crazy stuff, you know, when think in terms of what’s going on with invoices. You’ve got invoice history so you can see how long it took to go through your organization. You can what steps it took, how long Bob Smith hung onto it. In this case, we’re still proving these invoices but you would see payment data here as well, which would show how it was paid, when it was paid . And actually, we provide an image of the check. So for facilitating check payments for you, we supply that back for you. So lots of capabilities, also a hundred different reports out of the box that are available to you in the system. So that’s a quick view of our invoice automation.

I want to talk about the next step in the process as I mentioned. Hey, we’ve got invoices, they’re in Acumatica, they’re fully coded and approved, we’ve passed the invoice image in. Now we’re going to make a decision to pay vendors. So we can help facilitate, as I’ve said countless times, payments to your vendors. So what’s that look like? So you will create your payment form within Acumatica as you do today. It’s analogous to hey, I’m ready to print checks. So I create that payment file in Acumatica. Instead of pointing it at the micro printer, now I’m gonna send it to the average exchange portal.

So again, a password protected email so we can restrict who has access. So we’re logging into the pay portal. We’re going to go to home, so we’re gonna see what’s going on as far as payments. So this is showing the payments that are being processed. So this is real time data that you would receive. You would send that file and automatically you would be directed to this. This would show you, hey, right now I’ve got three payments that are processing. And here is the bank account information that I’m leveraging. Maybe some of you have multiple bank accounts.

So we’re not a bank, we’re not interested in lines or credit or deposits, so we’re a payment facilitator. So you maintain your existing bank relationships and bank accounts, this file presents us with a check sequence number from Acumatica, so it’s displayed here. And you can see specifically who’s being paid and you can see how they’re being paid. The amount, whether it’s a virtual card at e-payment, a check payment and then you can drill down under this little tab and you can see specifically what invoices are being paid.

So that’s a way that you have instantaneous data in identity of what’s going on in your payment process, you can see. We work with you and your vendors to determine what payment process they want to elect. And they can always change. We don’t force vendors into electronic payments, we give them an alternative, an option. Any of those vendors, just FYI for you that are on the phone and may be familiar with this concept, that adopt electronic payments, mean a rebate back to your company. So for simply passing the payment data to your avid pay portal, you could make money back on the payment. But we never force a vendor into the process.

Also, we can address, hey, the boss wants to see, the owner or the CEO wants to see the checks, we have this approval tab. We can set up what we call pay control. This would be that person’s ability to approve a payment, to comment, or to hold a payment. And you can actually drill down. So we’re showing the Bank ID, the check number and again, they can drill down and see the invoice data here.

So all this can be mobile, it could be on a tablet or an iPhone or an Android and they can get alerts on the pay side as well as the invoice side and tell you if they got payments. What that means to them, the benefit is hey, I don’t have to come into the office at the end of the day to approve invoices or make payments or wait till the end of the week. So I can be more fluid in my business process. I can adapt and adopt as I need to move, so I’m not waiting for these standard kind of days in the week that I do these things, they can happen when they are beneficial to me and my business.

So that’s a quick view of both our invoice and payment automation. We do automate, we do have a purchasing card, we do have a utility application, we do have an appeal requisition process that we’ve added to our modules of AP automation that are available to our customers. We’re happy to have a conversation in regards to those things. Let’s jump back to the presentation. So I appreciate your time today and the opportunity to show you what we do here at AvidXchange and how it benefits Acumatica users. So I think Britney’s going to come on in a few moments and we’re going to run an audience focus. We’re going to answer a question, so Britney?

Britney: Thanks, Mike. So you will a poll up right now and it’s just asking what your next steps are. And this will just allow us to make sure that we follow up with you in the best way that you want to be reached. So if everyone can just take one second to answer that. And while we wait for that to come in, we will answer one or two questions. So just remember that if you have any questions to please put those into the questions box in your control panel and we’ll make sure to get through as many as we can. We do have one question, Mike. And it is what happens if a vendor is not currently in your system?

Mike: Sure, well that’s…as my customers, there is a benefit of automating the process. So there’s a check and balance here. So if we receive an invoice from a vendor that’s not been set up, whether you scanned it in, it’s emailed or mailed in, we collaborate, we communicate with your team early on and say, “Hey, here’s a net new vendor.” Remember I talked about following the order of your accounting system? Acumatica is a system of record, we want you to do those processes within your accounting system. So we notify you early on that hey, we’ve got an invoice from a vendor that’s not set up. Because what we’re doing is syncing new vendor data out of your Acumatica system and exposing in your AP portal. We just want to make you aware that that’s happening, so we notify you early on in the process.

Britney: Right, thanks, Mike. And we’re about 50% of people that have put into the polls, I’ll keep it up for a few more seconds. And while we wait for people to put that in, we have another question, Mike. And it is, is there a limit to the number of users that can be within AvidXchange?

Mike: Yeah, great question. No, we’re not working on a cedar site license here, it’s a hosted solution. No limitation, you’re not buying a book of users. We operate in what we call a transaction model so you simply pay for what you process through our solution. So we have a one-time implementation fee, a [inaudible 00:42:39] voice transaction in a payment. Reason we do those separately is that sometimes people will say, “Hey, I’m interested more in your payment solution than on your invoice solution or I’m interested more in your invoice solution than your payment solution.” So we give you flexibility, it’s a module you can add on.

So very easy to budget for but we don’t restrict users. You’re controlling that, you’re providing people access. We coach you, show you and train you. Actually, there’s lots of tools I didn’t show you today, they’re on site, on the portal that help accelerate the adoption rate by yourself and also your employees that are beneficial. So great question, thank you.

Britney: Great, thank you, Mike. And we’re at 75% right now, so I’ll keep it up for one more second. And we have time for just one more question. And Mike, the next question was how does the invoice payment information get into your accounting system?

Mike: The invoice payment information? So I’m assuming based on what I hear the payment file. So you simply create your payment file, your payment file inside of Acumatica. And then you just simply log into your avid pay portal and you upload that file or you pass that file. I think we integrate with over a hundred different accounting systems. I think in Acumatica we’re actually using the API for payments too. So you simply would send that, pass that information to your avid pay portal and then we take the process from there. So it’s as you do today and that’s the beauty of it.

So the way we facilitate those payments, we provided you all…we provide the vendor all remittance data but we also provide you reconciliation transactional history. And as I mentioned earlier, an image of the check to answer that question from the vendor. We also, in the remittance detail, we’ll encourage vendors to call us because we have processed the payment. What that ultimately means back to you, it’s a nice benefit because it’s again, it’s additional time. You’re letting us do our job and your folks are freed up to do other things in the company.

Britney: Great, thank you so much. And we do have to end our webinar right now. So if you have any additional questions we’ll make sure to follow up to answer those with you. But do you have anything to add Mike before we close up?

Mike: No, again I appreciate everybody’s time. Thanks for joining us. As we mentioned in the beginning, you’ll get a copy of the webinar along with the slides. So if you’re out there doing research, it’s not about whether you automate today or whether you’re going to automate, it’s just a matter of time. The technology, the costs, your adoption of Acumatica is a clear sign that your interest, a strong interest in cloud-based solutions. And we as a partner of Acumatica can be an add-on that can be seamless to your experience with Acumatica, solving the problem of saving time and money that are spent in the manual AP process from invoices and payment.

So thank you again. My name is Mike Johnson. That’s Britney on the other side and we appreciate your time and attendance. And if you have any questions let us know. One other quick thing, see that avidxchange.com? Great. If you’re doing research, great research capabilities are there. Lots of content, lots of the data that we use in the reference to these the slides from reports from pay stream and . Also videos, testimonials, also a nice little ROI calculator because I often find that in finance somebody at some point raises their hand and say, what’s my ROI?

So we have a very streamlined ROI process. Not really deep, it’s really asked three questions. How many people? How many checks? How many invoices you process on a monthly basis? It takes the industry statistics that we talked about, the time and the cost associated with it, applies at what the automated cost would be and that’s your ROI. It will actually tell you how much time you’re gonna save, gives you an estimate on time and dollars.

So once again, I’m Mike Johnson. Thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon and let us know if you have any questions. Thanks.